by Jeremy Black
The Labour government was determined not to use troops to maintain order, and, in July, the Cabinet agreed to the use of CS gas by the police in an attempt to avoid such a deployment. However, in the face of rioting in Derry and Belfast, the Cabinet, the following month, reluctantly agreed to accept the use of troops to restore peace. They were intended as a short-term measure, to be withdrawn as soon as peace was restored, and to protect Catholics as much as Protestants, but, instead, their very presence became an issue and a cause of further violence.
The Labour government did not wish to impose direct rule from London, and succeeded, in the short term, in restoring order, but no long-term solutions were provided, and order remained fragile. The attempt to impose a curfew on the Falls Road in Belfast in July 1970 was rejected by its Catholic community, while the authorization in August 1970 of the internment (imprisonment without trial) of suspected terrorists increased tension in 1971, which witnessed the first killing of a British soldier by the Provisional IRA.
The following year, there were widespread shootings and bombings, including ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Londonderry and ‘Bloody Friday’ in Belfast. The first, in which fourteen civilians were shot dead on 20 January 1972, marked the moment when the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland came to regard British troops as an occupying force.
The Provisional IRA, founded in 1970 as a violent alternative to the older official IRA, and the (Protestant) Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Freedom Fighters, pushed terrorism up the political agenda, as both communities became engulfed in paramilitary-led violence. The British government reacted with a determined attempt to reimpose control, increasing the number of troops from 6,000 in 1969 to 20,000 in 1972. In Operation Motorman, the Provisional IRA’s ‘no-go’ areas in Londonderry and Belfast were reopened for military and police patrols, which led the Provisional IRA to abandon attempts to stage a revolutionary war, an important moment in the history of the UK, and, instead, to turn to terrorism.
The continued intractability of the situation resulted in the imposition of direct rule from London: the Unionist regional government and the Stormont Assembly were suspended in March 1972, but the Heath government assumed that this would be a temporary measure, and there was no attempt to integrate Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom. Instead, Heath wished to establish the conditions under which Northern Ireland could become self-governing again, but on a different basis than before: this time there would be a genuine cross-community government in Northern Ireland. The government sought, with the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, and the creation of a non-sectarian power-sharing Executive, which took office in 1974, to negotiate a settlement, but these measures did not command sufficient cross-community support. In an echo of the role of the National Union of Mineworkers in bringing down the Heath government, the Ulster Workers strike of May 1974 and the collapse of the power-sharing Executive led to the resumption of direct rule that spring. At a distance, the Sunningdale Agreement prefigured the eventual Good Friday Agreement, but the time was ‘wrong’ in 1973, whereas in the 1990s it was clear to the Provisional IRA that they could not win.
In 1974, Northern Ireland seemed completely ungovernable. Instead, the Army had to maintain a semblance of order sufficient to demonstrate to the terrorists that they could not win, and also to encourage intransigent Catholic and Protestant politicians eventually to talk with each other, a very long-term task. Provisional IRA terrorism made it difficult for the Army to fraternize with the population, and ambushes ensured that garrisons had to be supplied and reinforced by helicopters. Furthermore, the Provisional IRA found shelter in the Republic of Ireland and it proved impossible to control the border. The Army acquired considerable experience in anti-terrorist policing, but the difficulty of ending terrorism in the absence of widespread civilian support became readily apparent. Policy would probably have been different had there been a conscript army. Conscripts might have been unwilling to serve in Northern Ireland, and the deployment and tactics employed might have placed a greater emphasis on avoiding casualties.
Foreign Policy from the 1970s
Meanwhile, and also unexpectedly, the international body that seemed most powerful and effective in Britain was not the EEC, but the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was designed to stabilize the international economy by helping states with a liquidity or balance of payments crisis. In the face of a serious economic and fiscal crisis, the Callaghan government (James Callaghan; 1912–2005) sought a loan in 1976, and had to accept public expenditure cuts. Moreover, the constitutional issue that was most prominent in the late 1970s was relations within Britain, specifically Scottish and Welsh devolution, not relations within the EEC.
Imperial fragments continued to gain independence in the 1970s, for example the Ellice Islands (as Tuvalu) in 1978 and the Gilbert Islands (as Kiribati) in 1979. However, the empire’s replacement, the Commonwealth, amounted to little in the international system or even in British foreign policy. It had been seen as a way to retain imperial cohesion and strength, and thus to strengthen Britain, as well as to serve as the basis for an international community spanning the divides between First and Third Worlds, white and black. In 1949, the prefix ‘British’ was discarded from the title of the Commonwealth, and it was decided that republics might remain members, a measure that allowed India to stay in. Commonwealth unity was fostered by a Secretariat, established in 1965, and by Heads of Government meetings.
However, the idea of cooperation succumbed to the reality of different interests and concerns. Relations with white-ruled South Africa, Britain’s immigration policies and the consequences of Britain’s concentration on Europe all led to differences between Britain and Commonwealth partners, but the absence of common interests and views was of greater significance.
Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, and a politician of conviction and vigour, sought to centre Britain’s international position on alliance with the US, not membership of the EEC, still less the Commonwealth. She was helped by her close relations with Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), Republican President of the US from 1981 to 1989. Both were firmly opposed to communism, and Cold War tensions revived with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in late 1979. Reagan, in turn, was willing to let Thatcher take a role that was disproportionate to the respective strength of the two countries. Although she did not always take his lead, the relationship was special to Thatcher, for it gave her great influence on a world scale.
Moreover, American logistical support greatly aided the British in the Falklands War of 1982. This conflict, the last fought by the British alone, was begun when the Argentinians successfully invaded the British-owned Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The islands had a British settler population and had been under British control since 1833, but they were claimed, as the Malvinas, by the Argentinians, then under the rule of a new military junta which was convinced that Britain would not fight, a conviction owing much to the withdrawal of Naval coverage in the South Atlantic. Rejecting mediation attempts that would have left the Argentinians in control, the British sent a task force that reconquered the Falklands. Running down the Navy, the Thatcher government had not been prepared for the conflict, the focus of its defence planning having been on the Cold War.
Nevertheless, the government benefited in the crisis from an upsurge in domestic popularity. Despite Nationalist graffiti in Northern Ireland praising the Argentinians, British Catholics did not play a hostile role comparable to that of some Muslims when British forces were committed in Iraq from 2003. Furthermore, the opposition Labour Party leader, Michael Foot (1913–2010), badly misjudged the Conservative response. Thinking that this was another instance of Conservative appeasement, a re-run of 1936–8, Foot pressed for action against Argentina, a right-wing dictatorship (he was far more tolerant of the left-wing variety), only to find Thatcher provide it.
As a result, it was Labour that was split (although only a minority of the Labour Party opposed the war), w
ith, in contrast, very few Conservatives critical of the leadership. The failure before the conflict to provide deterrent signs to Argentina was not brought home to the government at this stage, and critical later enquiries were to lack political weight.
Internationally, the dictatorial nature of the Argentinian junta, and the fact that the Falklanders did not want to be ruled from Buenos Aires ensured that Britain benefited from a more supportive response than that shown during the Suez Crisis. American policy, however, proved a particular difficulty, as the Reagan government supported conservative dictatorial Latin American regimes and did not wish to see a war between two allies. Indeed, the American response was a reminder of the conditional nature of alliances, and of the need, in reply, to rely on resolution and to benefit from divisions among the policymakers of allied states. Initially, the British found President François Mitterrand (1916–96) of France more ready to offer support, not least information on the Exocet missiles France had sold to Argentina. The claim by Mitterrand’s psychoanalyst that Thatcher threatened the use of nuclear weaponry against Argentina unless France provided such information is implausible.
The successful resolution of the conflict strengthened Thatcher’s reputation for resolve, and led to the fall of the military junta in Argentina. Moreover, despite CND protests and a women’s encampment outside the base in Greenham Common, American cruise missiles were deployed in order to provide added strength against the Soviet Union; while, in 1986, American bombers attacked Libya from British bases.
The close relationship with the US proved divisive within Britain, because the Labour Party’s move to the left in the early 1980s led to a rejection of key aspects of foreign and defence policy, including the country’s status as a nuclear power, a status that rested on the intercontinental ballistic missiles carried by Britain’s nuclear-powered submarines. The relationship also affected Britain’s position within the EEC, as although she did support the American invasion of Grenada in 1983, Thatcher instinctively preferred to side with the US. Indeed, differing attitudes towards the US were part of a wider contrast between Britain and its European partners.
Thatcher was especially critical of what she saw as a preference for economic controls and centralist planning in the EEC. In 1988, she declared, in a key speech at the College of Europe in Bruges, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ In this and other respects, Thatcher’s government was more influenced than its Continental counterparts by the emergence of neo-liberal free market economics in the 1980s.
Moreover, contributing to this contrast, she, and the British public, were at least partly shielded from the implications of economic decline by the extraction of large quantities of oil from under the North Sea from the mid-1970s. By 1986, oil production constituted 5 per cent of British GDP. Seeing off the miners’ strike of 1984–5, and thus defeating the hopes nurtured by the far left for a collapse of capitalism, Thatcher favoured the extension of free trade within the EEC, but was highly critical of the federal pretensions and policies of EEC institutions; and, with the battle over the British rebate in the mid-1980s she fought hard to reduce Britain’s disproportionately high financial contribution to the EEC.
Yet, by signing the Single European Act in 1986, Thatcher gave new powers to the European Parliament and abolished the veto rights of a single state in some key areas of decision-making. Exemplifying the degree to which British politicians did not understand the momentum towards federalism integral to the EEC, Thatcher did not appreciate what she was doing. She no more realized what would flow from the Single European Act, as the momentum for the creation of a single European market gathered pace, than she understood the consequences of her failure to retain support among Conservative backbenchers. Indeed, as a politician, Thatcher was gravely weakened by her inability to appreciate the potential strength of those she despised. Her own attitude towards the EEC was more bluntly put by Nicholas Ridley (1919–93), a minister close to her who was forced to resign from the Cabinet in 1990 after calling the European Community ‘a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe’. For many (but not all) of those whose experiences had been moulded during the Second World War, the situation seemed particularly troubling.
Thatcher’s alienation from the EEC, by then the European Community (EC), became more serious as the EC developed in a more ambitious direction. The Delors Report of 1989 on economic and monetary union proposed a move towards a single European currency. Thatcher found herself pushed towards closer links by her leading ministers, and eventually took Britain into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS) in October 1990, but also made it clear that she would never accept a single currency. However, her reluctance over European integration had fractured Cabinet loyalty, and this provided the lightning rod for dissatisfaction with her leadership within the Cabinet and parliamentary party.
Thatcher’s successor as Conservative Prime Minister, John Major (1943–; Prime Minister 1990–7), initially spoke about his desire to place Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’, but, nevertheless, resisted the concentration of decision-making within the EC at the level of supranational institutions. In the Maastricht Agreement of December 1991, Major obtained an opt-out clause from Stage Three of economic and monetary union, the single currency and from the Social Chapter, which was held likely to increase social welfare and employee costs and to threaten the competitiveness and autonomy of British industry. Major also ensured that the word ‘federal’ was excluded from the Agreement.
Major’s reputation, nevertheless, was wrecked by Europe. He had supported entry into the ERM at an overvalued exchange rate because he believed that this would squeeze inflation out of the British economy, but, in the midst of grave economic circumstances, the government found itself obliged to respond to the financial policies of Germany, the strongest economy in the ERM. Crucially, the Bundesbank did little to help Britain. Its different fiscal priorities forced Britain first to raise interest rates to a damagingly high level and then, in 1992, to leave the ERM in a humiliating fashion on ‘Black Wednesday’, 16 September 1992.
The reputation of the Major government for economic competence was destroyed. Paradoxically, however, this product of fiscal weakness helped maintain a degree of national autonomy, notably with a free-floating exchange rate and with the Bank of England setting interest rates. This autonomy was furthered at the close of the decade when Britain stayed out of the Euro despite the wishes of Tony Blair, who became Labour Prime Minister in 1997.
After the exit from the ERM, Europe continued to be a divisive issue within the Conservative Party and government. It became more so, because the general election of 1992 had left the government with a parliamentary majority that was so small that it was very vulnerable to dissent; and there was dissent aplenty over Maastricht.
Conservative disunity and failure over Europe – an inability to shape the EEC, or to limit its consequences and its impact on British politics – contrasted with a more assertive stance elsewhere abroad. The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought to an end one era of competition between the great powers, and Britain was on the winning side. Britain also took a prominent role in the American-led coalition that in 1991 drove Iraq from Kuwait, which it had conquered the previous year. This war was both successful and did not have divisive consequences at home. The Americans very much took the leading role, but the British made a contribution, at sea, in the air and on land. The war did not lead to any occupation of Iraq, and the ease of exit from the conflict contrasts markedly with the Gulf War of 2003.
Tony Blair sought anew to square the circle of differing international interests and identities for Britain. Like Heath, he was convinced that closer European integration was central to his strategy for modernization, and, under Blair, there was an erosion of national sovereignty and a reckless transfer of powers to Eu
ropean institutions; an erosion that was in the logic of the 1986 Single European Act. Yet, despite Blair’s wish to join the European currency, the Euro, he felt obliged to be cautious, because of the more sceptical nature of public opinion, the caution of his powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and the different circumstances of the British economy.
Political contrasts emerged more clearly in 2003 when Blair supported the US in the invasion of Iraq, a step France and Germany publicly opposed. This invasion followed British military commitment against Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan after the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and represented a return to an ‘east of Suez’ commitment that contrasted markedly with the trend of British policy from the late 1960s.
Yet, the basis of this commitment was no longer that of supporting an imperial presence. Instead, the British government saw itself as playing the role of key member of the Western alliance, and, in particular, vital ally of the US. Blair captured the national mood in 2001 when he declared, on the evening of 11 September, that ‘we in Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in the United States against the evil of mass terrorism’. Against Iraq in 2003, Britain played a secondary role, but an important one because of the potential for overstretch created by the relatively small size of the American force. The 2003 Defence White Paper argued that ‘priority must be given to meeting a wider range of expeditionary tasks, at greater range from the United Kingdom and with an ever-increasing strategic, operational and tactical tempo’.
Yet, the ability of Britain to sustain this ambitious policy was far less clear. Moreover, with the US becoming less powerful in the world, at least in relative terms, the prudence of this expeditionary warfare seemed uncertain. Indeed, the ability of British policymakers to adapt to a multipolar world in which China is more powerful is at issue. Furthermore, the political context of British military activity in the 2000s was very different to that of the 1950s. A combination of the individualist and anti-Establishment culture of the 1960s, the end of national service, opposition to the Vietnam War and the impact of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had greatly strengthened anti-war feeling.